The number of patients with coronary artery disease continues to rise resulting in a third of global deaths and afflicting over seventeen million individuals in the United States alone. Once patients are diagnosed with coronary artery disease using medical imaging techniques including angiography, ultrasound, and computed tomography, they are treated with medications, lifestyle changes, interventional procedures, or open heart surgery depending on the severity of their disease. Flow rate and pressure in coronary arteries are measured invasively during interventional procedures or open heart surgery. However, the information obtainable from the medical imaging techniques and the invasive flow and pressure measurement techniques are limited because the resolution of the medical imaging techniques are sufficient to visualize only the larger arteries, and the flow and pressure measurement techniques are highly invasive and restricted by time and the physical condition of the patient. However, information on coronary flow rate and the pressure of the coronary vascular beds of a patient is crucial to select treatments.
Computational simulations have proven to be useful in studying blood flow in the cardiovascular system and include research on the hemodynamics of healthy and diseased blood vessels, the design and evaluation of cardiovascular medical devices, planning of cardiovascular surgeries, and the prediction of the outcomes of interventions. However, computational simulations have been rarely used to predict pulsatile velocity and pressure fields of three-dimensional coronary vascular beds, in part because the flow rate and pressure in the coronary vascular beds are highly related to the interactions between the heart and the arterial system. Unlike flow in other parts of the arterial system, coronary flow decreases when the ventricles contract, increasing the intramyocardial pressure. Coronary flow increases when the ventricles relax, thereby, decreasing the intramyocardial pressure. Therefore, to model coronary flow and pressure realistically, it is necessary to have a model of the heart and a model of the arterial system with consideration of the interactions between the two models.
Because of this complexity in modeling coronary flow and pressure, most three-dimensional computational studies have been conducted with coronary arteries only, ignoring the interactions between the heart and the arterial system and prescribing, not predicting, coronary flow. Further, these studies have not modeled realistic pressures and generally use traction-free outlet boundary conditions. The analytic models used as boundary conditions were coupled explicitly, necessitating either sub-iterations within the same time step or a small time step size bounded by the stability of an explicit time integration scheme. To predict the flow rate and the pressure in the coronary arterial trees of a patient realistically, computational simulations should be robust and stable enough to handle complex flow characteristics, and the coupling should be efficient and versatile to different scales of computer models.
In view of the above, there remains a need in the art for new and improved techniques for more realistic computer models of coronary flow rate and pressure.